Guest post by Steven Goddard
Last week, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon warned that “polar ice caps were melting far faster than expected just two years ago“
This was based on a number of widely publicized scientific studies released this year claiming that both the Arctic and Antarctic are melting faster than expected.
As recently as last week, scientists were sounding the alarm.
Tues., April 28, 2009OSLO – The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have awakened and are melting faster than expected, a leading expert told peers ahead of a conference of ministers from nations with Arctic territory.Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, an expert with the Center for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, told the conference in the Arctic town of Tromsoe that the need for a wake-up call was genuine for the polar and glacial regions.
He apparently didn’t read this paper from last Autumn’s AGU Meeting
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.
One has to wonder if some scientists are lacking access to the Internet, as the amount of polar sea ice on the planet is above the 30 year mean.
Yesterday, NSIDC announced that “Arctic sea ice extent at the end of April 2009 was within the expected range of natural variability.” and “The decline rate for the month of April was the third slowest on record“
The NSIDC graph below shows that April ice extent has actually increased by more than the size of Texas over past last two years. Clearly The UN Secretary General is mistaken when he claims “”polar ice caps were melting far faster than expected just two years ago.”
I took this graph a step further and compared 2009 vs. past years. Current April extent is the greatest in the last 8 years. It is greater than it was 20 years ago.
If you look at the last 20 years, there is no statistically significant trend in the data.
Arctic ice extent is essentially normal.
It is important to remember that ice area between mid-April and mid-August is what affects the earth’s climate, because that is when the sun is up highest in the sky. When the ice reaches it’s minimum in September, the sun is so low above the horizon that the presence or absence of ice has little impact on the earth’s SW radiation balance. A more complete explanation here .
Also, the claim of Polar Bear endangerment is based largely on the idea that the ice is supposedly breaking up earlier than it used to in the spring. The “third slowest melt on record” would hardly support that popular claim.
I continue to be astonished at the amount of misinformation being propagated by some scientists and governmental officials. The correct information is readily available to anyone who has access to Google and five minutes of time. What is the real agenda?
I can see the headline now:
Rutgers Study Says Less Ice Promotes Warming
Many on the alarmists side, such as radio host Thom Hartman, have been declaring that we are witnessing AGW caused “climate chaos” just as the IPCC predicted.
Well, they’re half right.
We are clearly witnessing chaos.
Climate? Not so much.
If the three Catlin stooges were so convinced the North Polar ice cap was melting dramatically……..
Catlin Quote.
“Regardless of exactly when the summer ice will disappear, the downward trend is clear, and shrinking ice cover will change almost everything in the Arctic, and will also be felt globally.”
……..then why did they plan to be picked up in June when they would [by their own claims] have had to be walking on water/or travelled at Olympian speed for all the time they were on the ice? Not 6.12 Kms a day average.
Whatever the final days bring, the ‘scientific data’ they collect will have to be massaged to provide ‘proof’ of something outside the natural variation that Mother Nature provides.
I can see them lining up at Buckingham Palace for their medals as I type…….
UK Sceptic (11:26:21) :
I’d love to see George Monbiot of UK’s The Guardian suffer a sudden and highly embarassing Damascene conversion over AGW.
Me too! I’m not holding my breath, though – he’s so far down the road, it’s going to take some turning back.
It will be interesting to see how the Internet affects this, though. IIRC, the ‘ice age’ scare of the 70’s (using Hansen’s model!) died relatively quietly, but then we weren’t being told to modify our behaviour or suffer extra taxes, and nor was it discussed widely in the media.
Now, everything anyone wrote about AGW is preserved and there will be some awful wailing and gnashing of teeth by those who have been dining out on it for so long.
I’m not a vindictive person, but I have to say that it will give me a lot of pleasure…
Dr. Svalgaard @ur momisugly(10:09:19)!
“with perhaps some help from that third [and much hotter] place…”
What! An admission that the sun might conceivably prove us all wrong?!? Heresy! 😉
(Yes, I know you were referring to a hot, snowball-melting netherworld, but my initial misreading struck me as amusing.)
The problem I have with statements like those of the UNSG is that we have no idea what “expected” is. If they really think that a human lifespan or two indicates what should be “normal”, well, that’s as bad as thinking the Sun revolves around the Earth. And in most cases they’re only talking about 30 years. It’s narrow, arrogant, and just plain silly.
Why is 1979 the starting point for so many trends?
As I have often commented previously, for as long as the media are in on the scam it will persist.
One weekend of “Cooling” programmes and it all falls apart.
Never underestimate the power of the press even when we have that great friend the Internet.
Last week we were warned of an impending Pandemic called Swine Flu…so we waited…and waited for the first fatalities of the 750,000 predicted for the UK…yet within days we were shown interviews with people who had survived it.
Today in England a 12 year girl proudly pronounced it was “like a cold”.
We await the media reaction.
Once they get used to eating “humble pie” they might…they just might give AGW another look.
Well we can hope.
MikeN (12:25:27) :
Why is 1979 the starting point for so many trends?
Because that was when the trends began to head upwards….
You don’t want to have your trend diminishedby including earlier years with the opposite trend, do you?
The problem with the MSM is that, for them, impending disaster is much more newsworthy than impending normality…
Quoting:
“The Alarmists have already been proved wrong. That was the easy part–the Earth has done it for us.
The next step is getting the Alarmists to ADMIT they were wrong and that, I’m afraid, will take heaven AND Earth.”
Commenting:
You’re bucking for quote of the week, ain’t ya? 😉
What is the real agenda?
There are multiple agendas at work here.
Many people are genuinely concerned about the environment. They take the precautionary principle to heart and cannot separate science from the propaganda, cannot distinguish skeptical arguments from the straw-man counter arguments and believe a scientific consensus on AGW is both real and meaningful.
Others are profiteers like Al Gore. They are rent-seeking by playing upon the fears of the ignorant and gullible. Many scientists fall into this category because they depend upon government funding for their livelihoods. No crisis, no grant money.
Others, particularly politicians, are seeking more control. They don’t like capitalism, the internal combustion engine, or free choice and believe they know how best for everyone to live. Some of these believe they are saving the planet from catastrophe will others are just capitalizing on a crisis. Some are die-hard Marxists, despite the fact that communist nations have the worst environmental records ever.
Others, like Hansen, have a mixture of these plus a healthy dose of megalomania.
“Why is 1979 the starting point for so many trends?”
Possibly to do with when the satalites started recording data.
this is just a case of wether not climate, wether you look at facts or use the climate of hype
Most of the AGW crowd’s hysterical propaganda is based on the notion that summer Arctic sea ice minima was consistently in the 8-11 mil km2 range in the first half of the 20th century, though how exactly those projections are arrived at is seldom discussed, mostly from GCMs I would imagine, Given that kind of assumed baseline, nothing that’s likely to occur in the Arctic will stop them from cranking out dramatic graphs showing plummeting ice levels, to be dispensed to useful idiots in the media who have no idea what they’re looking at.
http://oregonstate.edu/groups/hydro/Seminars/spring09/docs/042209_Mote.pdf see pgs. 10-12
http://www.amap.no/acia/GraphicsSet1.pdf see pg. 10 http://nihongo.wunderground.com/climate/SeaIce_Fig04.asp
Echoing Kim, above, Wow!
Totaly OT but interesting
“We are animals”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2009/04/map_of_the_week_wicken_fen.html
I am still wondering why these results are ‘worse than expected’ when there is so much accuracy attributed to the GCMs.
And why do we often see quotes that sea levels are rising but there never seems to be any information on where this has occurred in order to check the accuracy of the statement?
No, it is not clear. One meaning is true, and that is made apparent when the sentence is reordered as “Just two years ago, polar ice caps were melting far faster than expected.” Look at the graphs at the top of this page, and you’ll see that around 2006 and 2007 there was less ice than now in the Arctic.
His statement is incorrect in the “ice caps” part, as the Antarctic’s ice has been growing, so it should say “Arctic ice cap”. Then there is the related issue about what was “expected”.
However, the fact that he said “just two years ago” indicates that he knows that the statement is completely false now. So despite the other errors in the statement, his addition of the “two years ago” phrase confirms that he knows he is being deceitful in using that description in a pronouncement.
Someone has already pointed this out on this forum, but to reiterate: the parallels to Orwell’s 1984 vision in his classic novel, 1984, are remarkable.
DOUBLETHINK and revisionist history are no longer figments of a genius’s imagination–they are today’s reality. The agenda: accumulation of power and subjugation of the masses by the governmental elite through scaring the daylights out of people, and other means of wool-pulling-over-eyes and destabilization of society.
According to Orwell: ” If human equality is to be for ever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.”
@ur momisugly Dave Middleton (09:58:54)
“Why do they always put a linear trend-line on the ice extent and temperature graphs?”
Excellent point. In fact I remember most of my undergrad science teachers docking us points if we *EVER* used the microsoft excel trendline feature. It is a very dubious thing to do but somehow this one area of science gets away with it time and time again.
In Texas we have a saying that describes this pretty well. “Beating a dead horse.”
Richard Heg (11:02:35) :
OT with all the discussion on the UHI on this site here is an article on the reverse “Farmers’ crops keeping US cool ”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17079-farmers-crops-keeping-us-cool.html
I went to New Scientist, but the article is embargoed.
“The World’s No.1 Science & Technology News Service
Sorry, this article is embargoed”
WUWT?
I only hope I live long enough to hear Al Gore eat his “the planet has a fever” words. Oops how silly of me, by then it will be manmade climate change, right? For you scientist types would that be AGCC?
I’m having a déjà vu’ experience over all this. It Reminds me of my son when he was 14 and claimed to know everything even when he was dead wrong. Perhaps these spoiled children all need a good spanking.
Regarding the Catlin expedition, has anyone who is more patient and detail oriented than me been keeping a log of the daily latitude and longitude readings for the Catlin expedition and plotting those readings on a map? I keep noticing odd anomalies, such as today the “Time on the Arctic Ocean” is listed at 67 days, even though the counter indicates 65 days, 15 hours and counting. Also, I assume the wind has been shifting all around while they have been waiting for the resupply, because they have drifted this way and that for the last 9 days. Given the misleading biotelemetry data, what are the odds that the latitude and longitude readings are fudged?